The dualities of life and death, desire and constraint, and the secular and sacred are some of the ideas that have drawn me to Mississippi. While many of these pictures are situated solidly within the documentary tradition, my greater interest lies in revealing the fragile, often invisible, thread of humanity that connects us all, despite the fear of difference.
Bio: Terri Garland is an artist who spent decades photographing the social fabric of the American South. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987 and her MFA in 1990. She continues to teach photography at San Jose City College while her alter-ego works as an organic flower farmer. As a graduate student, Garland began an examination of white Supremacist culture that has spanned over two decades, photographing individuals within the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, American Nazi Party and the Christian Identity Movement. Her most recent project, Louisiana, Purchased is a visual study of the ways in which we depend upon and demand, continuous supplies of fossil fuels and the resultant damage and ongoing destruction to coastal communities in Louisiana.
Her photographs are included in the collections of The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, The Art Institute of Chicago, The di Rosa Preserve in Napa, California, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Saint Elizabeth College in Morristown, New Jersey, the Bibliotech Nationale, Paris, France and Special Collections at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Among her awards are a WESTAF/NEA Fellowship, Silicon Valley Arts Council Grant, a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a grant from the Gulf Coast Fund that was used to teach photography to children during the summer of 2013 in the primarily Native American communities of Isle de Jean Charles and Pointe-au-Chien, LA.
